Now there's a too-big iPhone, a too-small iPhone, and a just-right iPhone: the iPhone 6. The newest iPhone's biggest feature is that it's bigger, and yes, that's a big deal. Although most apps aren't yet coded to take advantage of the iPhone 6's additional real estate, the new phone puts Apple's beloved operating system and gorgeous third-party apps into a body that no longer looks and feels cramped. That's enough to earn the iPhone 6 an Editor's Choice award on Verizon Wireless.
This is primarily a review of the Verizon iPhone 6, but the phone is available on all the major carriers at a bewildering range of prices. For instance, Verizon charges $199 with contract for the base 16GB model, Sprint includes a 16GB unit as part of a special $70 unlimited plan over two years, and T-Mobile charges nothing up front, but $27.08 per month. Unlocked, you'll pay $649 for 16GB, $749 for a 64GB unit, and $849 for 128GB.
The Measure of an iPhone
Figuring out the best size for a phone is a very delicate balance. Back in 2011, I judged the 4.65-inch Samsung Galaxy Nexus to be too large for some hands, but what I didn't get was that screen size isn't the problem. It's the overall phone width, which needs to be narrow enough so people with small, stubby fingers can grip it comfortably, while people with big, hammy fingers don't mistype words. Narrower bezels have meant we now have smaller phones with bigger screens, so everybody wins.
But there's still a limit. When LG introduced the G2, it said comprehensive hand studies had led it to believe that anything wider than 2.8 inches couldn't be used well in one hand, across a range of hand sizes. (Then it introduced the LG G3 , which is wider than 2.8 inches. When I asked why, LG execs just threw up their hands and said "people want this," like they had no choice in the matter.)
Similar Products
Samsung Galaxy S5 (Verizon Wireless)
HTC One (M8) (Verizon Wireless)
Nokia Lumia Icon (Verizon Wireless)
This all goes to say that Apple has figured out where the limit is for a one-handed device, and it's just teetering on it. The iPhone 6 is 2.64 inches wide. In my experience and that of many other tech reviewers, the 2013 Moto X, at 2.57 inches, is the perfect one-handed phone (seriously, that thing has a cult). The Samsung Galaxy S5 , at 2.85 inches, is just over the line. The iPhone 6 Plus, at 3.06 inches, is way past it.
That all goes to say that the iPhone 6 is the right-sized iPhone for right now. It's usable in one hand, it fits in a pocket, and it gives you maximum keyboard and video playback size while still feeling convenient. Yeah, sure, it could have been 0.07 inches narrower, as Motorola showed, but it's within the margin of comfort.
Physical Design and Battery Life
The iPhone 6 feels considerably different from previous iPhones. It's not just the size—at 5.44 by 2.64 by 0.27 inches (HWD), it's bigger and wider, but slimmer, than the iPhone 5s ( at Amazon) . It's tapered and smooth, rather than hard-edged; it feels a little more organic and less like an industrial product. We got a gold one, which has a white front and some white plastic lines running across the back, looking a little like a Mondrian painting.
Apple has maintained its premium feel. Compared with any Samsung phone now available in the U.S., or even my beloved Moto X, the iPhone 6 feels classier and made from more expensive, if not tougher materials. (Durability, alas, hasn't been shored up at all. Get a case.) Because it's so slim and rounded, the iPhone 6 slips very easily in and out of a pocket.
The iExperienced will notice Apple moved the power button off the top, where it's been for years, and onto the right side, where it sits on many competing phones. The side bezel looks like it's been reduced a tiny bit from the iPhone 5s, but this isn't one of those nearly bezel-less phones like the LG G3. The headphone jack, Lightning port, and speaker sit on the bottom edge, just as before.
Apple says that the A8 processor's advantage comes more in battery life than speed, and I found the iPhone 6 to have significantly better battery life than the iPhone 5s—although not nearly as good as the Samsung Galaxy S5. In our toughest battery test, which streams a YouTube video over LTE, I got 4 hours, 33 minutes on the iPhone 6's 1,810mAh battery, as compared with only about two and a half hours with the iPhone 5s and a spectacular 7 hours with the Galaxy S5. That doesn't mean that the iPhone 6 is going to last twice as long as last year's model, but it means that it'll have significantly more stamina if you turn the screen on a lot.
Next Page: Display, Call Quality, and Performance
Display, Call Quality, and Performance
Who's Zoomin' Who?
The iPhone 6 has a 1,334-by-750-pixel display at the same 326ppi as the previous iPhone 5s. Since we're jumping from 727,040 pixels to 1,000,500, we should get about 37 percent more real estate to play with, right? But that isn't the case—yet.
To maintain compatibility with earlier apps, the 6 defaults to just zooming those apps on the screen. Text, images; everything becomes larger, at the cost of an almost imperceptible bit of sharpness. A quarter-inch-high number, for instance, becomes 5/16 of an inch.
You can see the potential to do better in some of the built-in apps. The calendar agenda view, for instance, shows nine hours instead of seven. But others stick with the "make it larger" agenda. The built-in keyboard doesn't add any keys; it just makes them bigger and easier to hit. The Photo Gallery, for instance, still shows basically five rows by four columns, but the thumbnails are bigger. A news site on the iPhone 6 only shows three more lines of small text than on the iPhone 5s, but the text is slightly larger and more readable.
If you like bigger text and elements, by the way, you can lock the whole system into zoom mode, and even increase the font size overall.
I'd be more worried about this if Apple didn't have a perfect track record for getting its developers to adapt to new screen resolutions. With the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 transitions, there were a few months when many apps weren't adapted to the new screens, and then—pow. It isn't an issue any more.
And I've been feeling for about two years that the iPhone's interface, especially the touch keyboard, is pretty cramped. Remember how I wrote Why I Hate Touch Screens in 2009? A big part of the problem there was typing on too-small touch keyboards, it turns out. A keyboard on a 4-inch screen is just a touch too cramped. 4.7 inches? Just right.
Otherwise, the screen is effectively the same as on the iPhone 5s. It's still IPS LCD, which is cooler and less saturated, but truer than the intense colors you see on the Samsung Galaxy S5's default setting. The screen is less flexible than the S5's, too; you can customize the S5's color gamut, which you can't do here. Once again, we have the difference between the Apple and Android philosophies. Apple delivers you a screen which defaults to truer colors, while Samsung lets you choose between a range of settings buried several levels down which you may never be able to find.
Apple says the screen viewing angle is better, but in my experience that's mostly because the device is slimmer and more tapered. At extreme angles, you don't end up with the body of the phone in the way of your viewing. I did notice the icons seemed to leap out of the screen even at extreme viewing angles when compared with the iPhone 5s.
Call Quality, Networking, and Wi-Fi
iPhones have always been good-enough voice phones rather than the absolute best, and that's the case here. The good news is that the iPhone 6 has a very warm, round voice tone in its earpiece, and plenty of volume. Verizon's iPhone will also support its HD calling over LTE; T-Mobile's supports HD Voice, LTE, and Wi-Fi calling. The speakerphone is just adequate. Transmission quality through the microphone was a bit wobbly and thready, but that may have been the Verizon network; it did sound, though, like the phone was struggling with noise cancellation in our very noisy area test.
Our iPhone 6 was a Verizon unit, but there are only two hardware models sold in the US: One is shared by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, and the other is for Sprint and US Cellular. If you're looking to switch one between carriers, buy a Verizon model, as it's unlocked for the other carriers. Sprint's phones are actually the most flexible, but it doesn't sell its units unlocked, and it won't activate other carriers' iPhones. The AT&T/T-Mobile/Verizon units have 16 LTE bands, while the Sprint units have 20; the difference is Sprint's Spark bands, which are only on the Sprint units.
In terms of future-proofing, there's mixed news. The iPhones support carrier aggregation, which Sprint and AT&T, especially, will use to make their networks faster over the next year. But they don't support Band 12, which T-Mobile will use to expand its network reach. So far, only Samsung's Galaxy Avant supports Band 12.
Wi-Fi speeds have really been boosted here. Measured against our test Meraki MR16 802.11n router, I got considerably higher Wi-Fi speeds on the iPhone 6, the 6 Plus, and the Samsung Galaxy S5 than on the iPhone 5s. While the 6 supports the new 802.11ac standard, its newer chipset improves performance even on slower networks. LTE speeds were already great on the Verizon network with the iPhone 5s, thanks to the device's support of Verizon's so-called "XLTE" spectrum; nothing's changed here, Verizon-wise.
Performance and Apps
The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus run on a 1.4GHz, 64-bit Apple A8 processor, as compared with the 1.3GHz A7 in the iPhone 5S. That translated to the best Geekbench and Sunspider benchmark scores we've seen yet. Geekbench scored about 16 percent better than the iPhone 5s. Raw CPU performance was on par with the 2.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 in the Samsung Galaxy S5 with all cores firing, but Apple's processor delivered much more power with just one core active.
What does this mean in practice (or in English?) As usual, apps that really take advantage of the A8 haven't been written yet, and real-life browser performance felt the same as on the 5s. But if you do something really CPU-crunching like video exporting, you'll see a distinct difference. Exporting a movie in iMovie, I found the iPhone 6 to be 27 percent faster than the 5s was.
The iPhone 6, of course, runs iOS 8. Unlike many reviewers, I don't think iOS is inherently "better" or "worse" than Android, and iOS 8 doesn't materially change the balance between the two operating systems. The new version adds some Android-like features, such as third-party keyboards and better sharing between apps, but it doesn't change the overall philosophy.
Next Page: Apps, Camera, and Conclusions
Apps, Camera, and Conclusions
iOS still gives you fewer, more closely curated interface options. Android has much greater customizability, but at the cost of complexity and, at times, instability. iOS still integrates with Macs far better than Android does, especially with the new Handoff/Continuity feature (Windows users don't get that). Android's Gmail app kills anything the iPhone has for that service.
If you think of your smartphone as a computer that you install things on, tinker with, and discover, you probably want Android. If you think of your smartphone as a gadget that does convenient things which are made clear and obvious to you, you're more of an iOS user.
One potential game changer, Apple Pay, is not yet available. Apple Pay lets you pay for things by tapping your phone on a credit-card reader—that's something Android devices have been able to do in theory for years, but Google never got the banks and retailers on the same page. Apple might just have the market clout to do it, but only time will tell. Look for an Apple Pay review in October.
You can read a lot more in our full review of iOS 8.
Photos and Multimedia
The iPhone 6 comes in 16GB, 64GB, and 128GB models. The 64GB model is obviously the sweet spot. Games and movies now regularly clock in above 1GB each, so 16GB just isn't going to cut it. Apple lent us the 128GB model, which reports itself as 114GB.
Now let's talk about optical image stabilization (OIS). The iPhone 6 Plus has it, and the 6 doesn't. But I just didn't find it to be a big deal—and in fact, I found some low-light photos taken with the 6 to be better than the 6 Plus's.
First, let's establish that the iPhones—all of the iPhones—crush almost every other phone on low-light performance. I took a range of side-by-side low-light photos with the new iPhones and a Samsung Galaxy S5, and you could cry. In good daylight, the S5's extra pixels kick in and you see the additional detail in its 16-megapixel camera. But in anything other than full sunlight, the S5 tended to go blurry while the iPhones stayed sharp.
The Focus Pixels on the iPhone 6 did noticeably improve focus time, I'd estimate by about half. You can still snap a shot before focus locks in, but it's really difficult. That's great.
In extreme low-light, indoor conditions, the 6 Plus's OIS made for a sharper image with truer whites. But when I took the 6 and 6 Plus out onto city streets at night, I was shocked. A city at night has very contrasting lighting, and in this case the 6 Plus's additional brightness meant that the lights from inside windows and businesses started washing out the rest of the image. The 6's streetscape photos were better balanced.
OIS also has no effect on video—both phones take fine, 1080p video at up to 60 frames per second and 720p video at up to 240 frames per second—so I just don't see it as a reason to automatically get the 6 Plus over the 6.
In terms of playing other media, these are iPhones. They play all your media.
Conclusions
Bigger isn't always better. The right size is better. I still believe phones (rather than "phablets") should be usable as one-handed devices. Unlike with the iPhone 6 Plus, you can take a photo with the 6 while waving at someone without worrying you're going to drop the phone. You can text while carrying a bag without worrying you're going to drop the phone. You can hold it up to your head comfortably, as if anyone does that any more. (Don't worry, readers, I know you do.) And the iPhone 5 form factor is eminently pocketable, but there was no reason to be quite so small any more. You can enjoy a larger keyboard without giving up flexibility.
After handling the physical elegance of the iPhone 6 for a while, my heart breaks for Samsung: The Galaxy S5, while its screen glows more brightly and its software is full of hidden little treats, just feels cheap by comparison. The gorgeous HTC One M8 ($450.00 at Amazon) is damaged by a poor camera. The Nokia Lumia Icon , with a great body and camera, demands a jump into a much less popular OS—and willingness to suffer some seriously de-featured big-name apps.
None of this will convert the hardcore Android user, because iOS is still iOS. I myself, don't think I can give up my home screen widgets and drag-and-dropping video files. But if you're a casual smartphone user who really doesn't care which OS is running on your phone, but want a solid experience? Get a 64GB iPhone 6.
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